With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, including cellphone devices, handheld devices, handheld computers, smartphones, PDAs, etc., there is a need for improving the user interface experience.
Mobile devices with capacitive or resistive touch capabilities are well known. Modern mobile phones have evolved over recent years to the point where they now possess a broad range of capabilities. They are not only capable of placing and receiving mobile phone calls, multimedia messaging (MMS), and sending and receiving email, they can also access the Internet, are GPS-enabled, possess considerable processing power and large amounts of memory, and are equipped with high-resolution color liquid crystal displays capable of detecting touch input. As such, today's mobile phones are general purpose computing and telecommunication devices capable of running a multitude of applications. For example, modern mobile phones can run, word processing, web browser, navigation system, media player and gaming applications.
Along with these enhanced capabilities has come a demand for larger displays to provide a richer user experience. Mobile phone displays have increased in size to the point where they can now consume almost the entire viewing surface of a phone. To increase the size of displays any further would require an increase in the size of the phones themselves. Even with the display size being at its maximum, the content on the display remains relatively small.
Indeed, a finger touching the display can obfuscate the very content being manipulated, making precise operations difficult. For example, selecting text often requires a user to grab and drag an insertion cursor. Additionally, because a single tap can be performed easily it is often reserved for cursor placement in a text editing field. However, a cursor is generally small relative to a user's finger and often positioned amongst other characters. As a result, upon user contact, a touch screen needs to decide whether the user is attempting to grab a cursor, or place the cursor in a different position. With the user's finger covering both the cursor and text simultaneously, it is difficult to know what operation is being attempted. Furthermore, the finger often covers text being selected because the cursor moves between characters that are hidden from view. As a result, touch screen user interfaces for selection often obscure text and provide inconsistent results, which cause user frustration.